In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

by Yeonmi Park

I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free.

I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea. Both of these events shaped me, and I would not trade them for an ordinary and peaceful life. But there is more to the story of how I became who I am today.

The only books are filled with propaganda telling us that we live in the greatest country in the world, even though at least half of North Koreans live in extreme poverty and many are chronically malnourished.

But as I began to write this book, I realized that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning.

I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.

But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.

But there was human intimacy and connection, something that is hard to find in the modern world I inhabit today.

When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy—and that is one of the very few features of life in North Korea that I actually miss.

But he was born in North Korea, where family connections and party loyalty are all that matter, and hard work guarantees you nothing but more hard work and a constant struggle to survive.

And while it’s true that my grandfather and my parents stole from the government, the government stole everything from its people, including their freedom.

In the free world, children dream about what they want to be when they grow up and how they can use their talents. When I was four and five years old, my only adult ambition was to buy as much bread as I liked and eat all of it.

They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

I think it’s because people are so oppressed in North Korea, and daily life is so grim and colorless, that people are desperate for any kind of escape.

There were so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you can’t care anymore. And that is what hell is like.

A chill washed through my veins when I realized that I might never see my father again. And even if he were to survive, when he got out I would be a grown woman. Would we even know each other?

In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse.

Still, I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself.

The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t free, and I wasn’t safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone.

I didn’t know anything about cancer because it is so uncommon in North Korea. This wasn’t to say the disease didn’t exist; it probably just went undiagnosed. Most people didn’t die of cancer because other things killed them first.

I knew in my heart that I deserved to be treated like a person, not a hunted animal.

Recently I have seen studies that indicate nearly 75 percent of recent North Korean defectors in South Korea have some form of emotional or mental distress. To me, this sounds like a low estimate.

I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I believed in a benevolent power guiding the universe, a loving force that somehow nudged us in the direction of good instead of evil.

She had always told me that to be happy, you must give to others, no matter how poor you are. And she thought that if she had something to give, it would mean that her own life would have some value.

Through helping others, I learned that I had always had compassion in me, although I hadn’t known it and couldn’t express it. I learned that if I could feel for others, I might also begin to feel compassion for myself. I was beginning to heal.

I learned something else that day: we all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.